RetailMeNot evolves from a deals destination into a personalized product discovery and savings experience

RetailMeNot partnered with Modus Create to rebuild its mobile app and move earlier in the shopping journey, evolving from a destination shoppers visited after deciding what to buy into a personalized shopping experience that helps them discover products, compare value, save, and earn rewards. In just five months, the team introduced personalized product discovery, product-level deals, rewards, and agentic search, giving shoppers more ways to find what they want and more reasons to return. The new app launched ahead of Black Friday and delivered a 57% increase in order frequency.

Our work involved

• User research and discovery
• Mobile app design and development
• Agentic search
• UX personalization and loyalty programs

Impact

Move fast and break things.

That’s easy to say when there isn’t much behind you to break. But when a market leader with 15 million monthly active users takes a bold swing, it’s all the more impressive.

RetailMeNot, a Ziff Davis company, spent two decades building a renowned brand in eCommerce. Millions of shoppers turned to it for promo codes, coupons, and cashback offers featuring more than 50,000 brands. And its mobile app was right at the heart of the experience.

But RetailMeNot was about to do something ambitious. It wanted to move up the shopping funnel and evolve from a deals destination into a personalized shopping experience, all in time for Black Friday. That meant retiring its existing mobile app and building a new one from the ground up in just five months.

Startups, it turns out, don’t have a monopoly on speed.

Challenge: Moving from the end of the shopping journey to the beginning

RetailMeNot already had the brand recognition to bring users through the door, yet roughly 70% of users who downloaded the app never returned after their first session.

The existing app offered plenty of great deals, but the lack of personalization made it harder to surface what mattered to each user. Long-time users who knew their way around could get plenty from the app. But for new users, that value wasn’t enough to create habit loops.

The deeper challenge was where RetailMeNot appeared in the shopping journey. Users often interacted with the app after choosing what to buy and where to buy it, hoping to find a coupon before checkout. RetailMeNot saw the opportunity to become useful much earlier, shaping discovery and encouraging users to return.

The team soon realized piecemeal fixes wouldn’t get them the results they wanted. So, they made the call to flip the app on its head and completely rebuild it.

Black Friday is eCommerce’s Super Bowl, and RetailMeNot wanted to launch the new app a few months ahead of it, giving them enough time to refine the experience before the holiday rush. That left just five months for the entire rebuild.

RetailMeNot teamed up with Modus Create to help with the project. As one integrated team, we started rebuilding the mobile experience at a rather un-corporate pace.

“It really did not feel like hired guns. It really felt like Modus Create were on the RetailMeNot team, and we were all working together toward the same goal.”— Doug Hof, Director of Product Design at Ziff Davis

Solution: Moving from discounts to discovery

RetailMeNot already had several exciting ideas for the application, and as the project started, nothing was off the table.

1. Turning early ideas into a clear plan

The rebuild began with a week-long workshop that aligned RetailMeNot and Modus Create around the product vision. Rather than treating the roadmap as a wish list, the team prioritized changes that would have the greatest impact on its users. As new ideas emerged, RetailMeNot kept reassessing what deserved attention and what could wait.

From the outset, RetailMeNot and Modus Create made the conscious decision to work as one team rather than as client and partner. Designers and engineers worked side by side in the same discussions and development environments, solving problems together as they arose.

2. Giving users reasons to come back

The rebuild gave RetailMeNot a rare opportunity to reconsider the experience down to the individual interaction, and the team intended to make the most of it. Consider the home feed as an example:

RetailMeNot had an enormous universe of deals, products, rewards, and content to draw from. Putting more of it on the home feed would only create more work for users. Therefore, the team took the opposite approach. They designed a personalized feed that could adapt from the first session, using onboarding preferences for new shoppers and existing RetailMeNot activity for returning users.

That same attention carried into the rest of the app, with new features designed to take most of the work out of finding good deals.

The five-month deadline made speed essential, but there was never any question of lowering the bar. The bonus tracker alone went through six or seven redesigns before the team landed on the experience it wanted, while the home feed went through numerous variations of its own.

“True partnership and the speed that Modus Create gave us was really fantastic. It was the only way really that we could get to a five-month timeline with all the work that we did for an entirely new app.” — Daniela Steiner, Director of Product at Ziff Davis

3. Venturing into the Wild West of agentic search

The team wanted to allow users to describe their needs in natural language, and surface relevant products and savings. It was promising territory, but also with its fair share of risk. Nothing frustrates users more than AI that just doesn’t get what you’re saying.

So the team spent time understanding the different intents behind shopper queries and studying how companies inside and outside e-commerce were approaching AI-powered search. Modus Create brought experience from previous agentic AI work, giving RetailMeNot a useful head start as the team worked through an experience whose conventions are still being written.

RetailMeNot ultimately launched agentic search as a beta alongside traditional search. Users could explore a new, more conversational way to find what they wanted without losing the search experience they already knew, while RetailMeNot could learn from real-world usage and refine the feature over time.

Impact: A personalized shopping experience, with a 57% increase in order frequency

RetailMeNot completed the rebuild in five months and rolled the new app out to 100% of its users. The early results are quite encouraging:

• Order frequency increased by 57%: Shoppers purchased more frequently on the new app, an encouraging signal that the experience is giving users more reasons to engage and return.
• The new rewards experience boosted orders: Shoppers participating in the bonus program were averaging around 3.5 orders, compared with a little over one order among non-bonus shoppers. It was still an early result, but an important one for a feature built specifically to reward repeat purchases.
• Zero critical crashes or platform stability issues: The app reported zero critical issues during the entire rollout phase.

Overall, RetailMeNot’s user research and in-app surveys showed substantially more positive than negative sentiment around the new experience and features.

“All of the consistent channels we’ve had are still getting attention, coupled with the fact that we now have this upside of new features that I’m really optimistic about.” — Tyler Saunders, Business Analyst, Business Intelligence at Ziff Davis

There is still plenty to learn as the new app finds its feet and newer bets like agentic search see wider adoption. But the early results have already vindicated the decision to think bigger.

In five months, RetailMeNot rebuilt an experience used by millions and gave shoppers more reasons to return. More importantly, it has moved up the shopping funnel. Deals and rewards remain at its core, but RetailMeNot can now meet shoppers much earlier in the journey, helping them discover new products and find more ways to save. For a brand once visited at the end of a purchase, that opens up stronger possibilities for the future.